A Womb of His Own - 21/21
Masterpost
“Hey, Bobby!” Sam called over his shoulder. “Dean wants tacos tonight!”
“Sam,” Dean hissed, looking in the direction of the house. “You’re gonna get me in trouble.”
“Tell Dean he can drive to Mexico!” came the surly reply.
Rufus pulled up in a rusty Jeep Cherokee and got a sack of groceries out the passenger side. “Don’t you two have anything better to do than sit around harassing an old man?”
“I heard that!” Bobby yelled, and the three of them laughed.
“What’s in the bag, Rufus?” Dean asked with curiosity. He really was hungry. And he really did want tacos.
“Ripe avocados, three beefsteak tomatoes, and two pounds of ground beef. Fiesta Mexicana.”
“Sweet lord, you read my mind.”
Rufus pulled open the front door. “Food’s not gonna cook itself.”
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Sam promised.
Dean looked at his brother, whose body was, for the first time in a long time, free of any supernatural abuse. In the three days since Bobby had gotten out of the hospital, Sam had gained thirteen pounds and grown an inch. There were no longer dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was shiny again. He looked healthy, and, although he wasn’t exactly radiating happiness, there was a serenity to him that Dean was unaccustomed to.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
Dean nodded. “You know, there’s a few things I’ve been wondering about.”
“Oh yeah? Me, too.”
“How’s that hell wall holding up?” Dean hedged, but what he really wanted to ask was if the absence of the baby soul meant Sam started remembering everything or if it had all disappeared forever.
“It’s great,” Sam hedged, peeling at the label on his bottle of beer. “Uh, I, uh, I can only remember the things that leaked out while the soul was still in there.” His eyes flicked over to Dean and then back to his bottle. “Like the night of the stabbing.”
“You don’t need to remember - ” Oh. Oh. “Sam, I’m -”
“And I remember coming to get you when you were with Lisa and Ben.”
Dean let out a slow breath. This was the moment he’d been waiting for since Death put up the hell wall in the first place. Sam was, he knew, five seconds away from kissing his ass in apology and blaming the fate of the entire world on himself. While Dean might have appreciated a good ass-kissing when they were little, even drawn it out longer than necessary by preying upon Sam’s guilty conscience, he didn’t want that now. He’d rather Sam think everything was his fault and hate him forever.
“You didn’t do -”
“Stop, just stop, okay?” Sam sighed. “I know it started a long time before you were a vampire, and I know it happened at least once after. But I also know I didn’t have a soul, and I pretty much wouldn’t have taken no for an answer.”
“I wasn’t a victim, Sam.”
“I’m not saying you were. I’m just saying - you were trying to live your life. Trying to live the life I wanted you to, with them, and I got you sucked back in, and I’m not saying it’s my fault either,” he added quickly, before Dean could protest.
“So what are you saying?”
“Just this. Us. We ruin each other’s lives. Constantly.”
The pregnancy symptoms were supposed to have vanished after the baby soul was transferred, but Dean still felt on the verge of tears.
“And there’s no one else I’d rather do that with,” Sam continued quietly. “Because there’s no one else who makes everything right.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. It felt important and meaningful, and Dean itched to end it before it went wrong. “Yeah, I’m way cooler than Samuel,” he said. He took a drink from his beer. “I mean, my hair alone…”
Sam didn’t call him out on the subject change. “You know, about that - did you really think Cas and the other angels chose dead people based on the probability that they would like anal sex?”
It sounded like a plausible theory back in Chester, but hearing it from Sam, it was pretty laughable. As if the junkless brigade could really figure that out.
“Of course not,” he scoffed. “Only the men. I just thought they picked women who were whores.”
Sam shook his head. “You know we made the right decision.” It was a half-question, half-reminder to them both of what they’d done. Dean didn’t really need it. He wouldn’t forget.
“And Bobby lives to harass us another day.”
“More like the other way around!”
“That soul give you Superman hearing or something?” Dean called back. He said it like he was joking, but really they were talking about some heavy stuff, and a little privacy would have been appreciated.
After Fiesta Mexicana it was probably time to hit the road. Bobby was okay, the soul baby was taken care of, and it was time to move on to their next problems. They needed to figure out why Crowley had helped Bobby instead of trying to nab the soul, and they needed to stop Cas from building his war machine in heaven. The fate of the world still hung in the balance, and the Winchesters were still caught in the middle.
It wasn’t a happy ending by any means. It wasn’t even an ending. But happy endings didn’t really exist for the Winchesters. It was as close to good as they could get under the circumstances. Dean was glad the soul had gotten the chance to do something meaningful with its life. He was glad that Bobby was okay and that Sam had gotten a chance at redemption so he could finally forgive himself for hurting Bobby in the first place.
But he couldn’t lie to himself, even if he lied to everyone else. He was sad to think that the soul wasn’t going to live its own life. That he would never be able to spy on its progress, thinking with pride how that soul came from him. From him and Sam.
Dean could look at Sam now without having pangs of reminders of what had happened - of how lonely and desperate he’d been, how easily he’d let himself slide down the slippery slope with the soulless version of his brother. It didn’t hurt anymore to think about it, and Dean wasn’t entirely sure that, if this version of Sam made the same offer, he’d even want to say yes.
“It just wasn’t meant to be,” he said aloud.
Sam nodded sagely.
They were going to be okay.
The End.
Notes and Acknowledgments
Thanks to hobnailedboots, vyperdd, phantomphan1881 for taking the time to review this story, and to yourrighteye for hashing out plot bunnies with me and forensicgirl for reading an early draft.
The story was based on this prompt from blindfold_spn. OP, thanks for the inspiration, even though I completely skewed your idea.
Thanks also to ysbail for the art. Go check out the art masterpost because there's some additional stuff there. And send love.